


The Things We Say in the Dark

by mosylu



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Angst, F/M, PTSD, Sharing a Bed, they're just so tired you guys
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-26
Updated: 2017-10-26
Packaged: 2019-01-23 08:01:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,761
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12502668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: After Scarif, the world is too loud, too hard, too bright for Cassian, and all he wants to do is escape it for a little while. So does Jyn.





	The Things We Say in the Dark

Cassian shut the door behind him and stood for a moment with his eyes closed. He let out his breath in a long, slow exhale.

He was so tired.

When he opened his eyes, the bright blue light from the door panel had shut off automatically, and the room was all cool calm blessed darkness.

He pulled off his shoes and socks, stripped out of his shirt and pants, and bundled all the cloth into the laundry by touch. He could have turned on the overhead light, but he wanted the dark. One less sense to pour information into his exhausted brain. The rustle and thud and rasp of his own movements were almost too much, but it helped that it was the only sound in his room.

Since Scarif, the world was too loud, too bright, too hard, and he could never quite escape it.

He felt his way to his bed (it helped that his quarters were so tiny) and pushed the covers back far enough to crawl in, then pull them back over him again. Lying on his back, he stared into the darkness, waiting for his brain to quiet. For his heart to stop thudding quite so hard, for his skin to stop registering the roughness of the sheets and the movements of the air.

Just to stop for awhile.

Above his head, the door panel lit up, flooding his room with thin blue light. He mouthed a curse, but rolled up on his elbow. “Yes?”

“Cassian,” a voice said, and he went still. “Can I come in?”

He reached up and tapped the button to open the door. The lock clicked, the door whooshed, and loud, rude light blared in from the hallway as someone stepped inside his room.

“Jyn,” he said, sitting up all the way, grateful he’d elected to leave his boxers and undershirt on to sleep in. “Are you all right?”

He could just see her expression but as usual, he couldn’t exactly read it. “You were asleep. I’ll go.”

“I’m in bed,” he said. “I wasn’t asleep. What is it?” His words were brusque - he didn’t know which other words to use - but he tried to make his tone as gentle as possible.

She put her hands behind her back. She was wearing thin cotton pants and a plain shirt, and her feet were stuffed into untied boots. Her hair fell loose around her shoulders, the ends curving into her collarbone, and he realized she’d been in bed too, but now she was here and -

He didn’t know what that meant. Sometimes he felt that he didn’t know Jyn Erso at all, and sometimes he felt that he’d never know her.

And sometimes he felt that he was the stranger, and she was the only thing he really knew.

“- stay here?”

He blinked a few times, aware that he’d missed something while muddling through his own head. “What?”

“I said can I stay here? Not long. Just - it’s loud in the barracks. Too many people.”

She shared quarters with three others, not bad as these things went. He wondered if she felt like he did. As if even one other person was too many.

But then, one other person apparently wasn’t too many, if it was him. 

(Or her.)

“Of course,” he said, and reached up to hit the door mechanism again. It swooshed shut, blocking out the lights from the hallway. The door panel was still on, flooding the room with blue, but it was better.

She settled herself into his desk chair, hooking her heels on the crossbar so her knees folded up. She hunched forward, hugging them a little.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” he said.

She looked down at her knees and didn’t say anything.

The light flicked off, and he said, “Jyn,” to the darkness.

Her voice crept back to him. “Are you ever tired?”

“It’s twenty-three hundred hours,” he pointed out. “And we were all up at oh-six-hundred this morning.”

“Not that kind,” she said. “Not sleepy. Just tired all the way to your bones.”

“Of what?”

“Living.”

He was struck into silence, and she misconstrued it.

“Not in _that_ way,” she said quickly. “I’m glad we’re alive. I’m glad we all made it. I want to be alive. It’s just that - ” She stopped.

He listened to the silence.

“It’s just,” she said, and stopped again.

“It’s very tiring, sometimes, living,” he said.

She gasped a little, and then didn’t say anything else for a long time.

Finally, she breathed, “I thought - I don’t know what I thought. But things - things were falling off my shoulders. I could - I was going to be able to let things go.”

He swallowed hard.

“On the beach, you know,” she added, almost shyly.

“Yes,” he said hoarsely.

“I just want to rest.”

“Me too.”

Silence. Then: “Right. Yes. Twenty-three hundred hours.” Rustle, rustle, then footsteps, moving toward the door.

He reached out and up, and whether it was because he had good hearing or excellent luck, his hand ran right into her upper arm. She stopped, and he slid his hand down her arm, to her hand, to weave their fingers together.

This close, he could hear the hitch in her breathing.

“I didn’t mean for you to go.”

Her fingers flexed around his. Her palm was rough and warm. His skin drank in the feel of her calluses, the raised scar from a blaster burn.

“I meant,” he said. “I - I feel the same.”

She was still. Stiller than still. 

He tried to put words together, words he didn’t use to express things he didn’t say aloud. “Twenty years,” he said. “It’s a long time to do anything, and resisting must be done constantly. Day in and day out. Everything you do coming back to that in the end. And for fifteen minutes, on that beach, I got to stop. I got to - to lay that down.”

Her fingers tightened around his, almost painfully.

“And now I am picking it up again, and it’s - it’s unimaginably heavy.”

“Yes,” she said. _“Yes.”_

Their hands, in the dark, in the quiet, connecting them, the same feelings running through both of them like a river.

“Do you want to stay here? Tonight?”

In the silence, he heard how it had sounded, and felt heat creep up his neck.

She said, “I didn’t come here to seduce you,” which wasn’t exactly what he’d been thinking.

“I didn’t think you had,” he said, which was entirely true. “All our body parts will stay where they belong.”

A little huff that might have been a laugh, and then the thin mattress sank down toward the edge of the bed as she sat.

Thump, thump - two shoes on the floor, he imagined, because when she crawled in next to him, her feet were bare, her rough heels scraping the tops of his feet ever so slightly before she pulled away.

He had to jam himself against the wall so she could fit in next to him, and even so, their knees and elbows bumped, and he could feel her breath on his cheek.

She gave a sudden squirm, knocking their knees together. They shifted and shuffled some more, and somehow in the process of getting everything to fit, the gap between them disappeared.

He remembered his promise, but apparently this was where his arm belonged, draped around her waist, and that was where her hand belonged, tucked into the curve where his neck met his shoulder.

She sighed. It whispered across his face. Tension hummed under his hand, as if her backbone were a high-power line.

“There are people you can talk to,” he said. “About - about that feeling.”

There were a few counselors, mostly double-specializing as medics, stretched atom-thin because everyone in the Rebellion was galactic grades of messed up.

He’d never been, himself.

“I went,” she said. “Once. It wasn’t - I know Scarif was hard. I know that kind of thing is difficult to process. All the things, honestly. Everything is hard. I didn’t need anyone to tell me that.”

“No, I imagine not,” he said gently. Of anyone, Jyn could look hard, angry truths in the eye.

“They said that when I got like this - ”

“Like what?”

“When everything got to be too much. Too loud. Too bright. Too busy. Too much. You know.”

He did.

“I needed to think of a place where I felt safe,” she said, and it made him laugh, sourly. Safe wasn’t a word that could be applied to much of her childhood, he imagined, the same as his.

“I thought of the beach,” she said, low, and the laughter died in his chest.

“The beach,” he said.

“I know. It doesn’t make sense. We were the opposite of safe, but it was - I felt peaceful. Serene, I guess.”

He lifted his hand and put it on her hair, tentatively. Smoothing it down. For him or for her, he didn’t know.

She ducked her head, resting her forehead against his shoulder. “I’ve spent all my life fighting,” she said into his shirt, “and after I threw that switch - there was nothing to fight for anymore. We’d sent the plans, the Death Star was there, and all I could see was the end, and all I had to do was wait for it. With you.”

He nodded, forgetting she couldn’t see in the dark, and cleared his throat. “Yes. I remember that.”

She let out her breath. Not exactly a sigh; not exactly not. “I shouldn’t want to feel like that again,” she said plaintively. “But I can’t sleep.”

So low he could barely hear it himself, Cassian said, “If it helps - you can always come here.”

“I don’t want to keep you awake,” she said.

He could feel sleep stealing over him already. “You’re not, though,” he said, hearing his words slur with tiredness. “You being here - I think it’s helping.”

This was not Scarif. They were wrapped in cool sheets and darkness, not hot sand and bright sun. But it was the same feeling as he’d had on that beach, with her in his arms and nothing to do but wait for the end.

Her fingers curled through the ends of his hair. “Yes,” she whispered. “Me too.”

He closed his eyes and breathed out, feeling her do the same, feeling their breaths mingle together between their bodies, where it was safe and warm, calm and dark.

Tomorrow was soon enough to pick up the burden again. Maybe it would be a little lighter.

FINIS


End file.
